Swedish Police Discovered Having Illegal Database Of Romani, Including Children

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Civil Liberties

Civil Liberties

This morning, it was discovered that Swedish police have been maintaining an extensive database of Romani people in Sweden, regardless of criminal history or suspicion. The highly illegal database includes kinship and one-quarter of the registered Romani people are children; over 50 are two-year-olds. This is a very loud warning bell of where things are heading.

This database, constructed by the Swedish police in the Scania district, was based on no other basis but the people being Romani. This was reported by the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter today.

There are (still) strict laws in Sweden governing when the police may construct databases over people. Kinship and minority background are most distinctly not two of them. Trust in the process of law is sharply eroded when the police ignores the law to this extent, and worse, knowing that nobody will be held to account for breaking the law.

The leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Anna Troberg, is furious, using unusually strong language: “I wake up to the news of the Police cataloging Romani. This makes me enraged to all fucking hell.”

The database of Romani has been national, attempting to catalog Romani people all over the country, and the database has been available by various means to all or most Swedish police employees. According to the Dagens Nyheter, not only Romani people have been noted in the database, but also people who have had relations to Romani.

“The database catalogs Romani children in most average Swedish cities. A two-year-old boy in Linköping and his four-year-old big sister. Two three-year-old girls in Västerås. A nine-year-old girl in Växjö. In Jönköping, there are four children in the Police database: a two-year-old boy, two eight-year-old girls, a ten-year-old girl.” — Dagens Nyheter

This cataloging gives a chilling touch of pre-WW2 history repeating itself. Anna Troberg demands answers in a press release:

“Transgressions must never pass unmarked. We must demand accountability from the individual policemen and all the way to the top. Also, we must not shy away from the unpleasant questions: what other secret databases exist in Sweden and what other minorities are being catalogued?” — Anna Troberg

Several other people are noting that Ministers of Justice have resigned for considerably less in the past.

The people in Sweden who have been discarding the NSA/GCHQ/FRA mass surveillance with a shrug and a “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” appear to be waking up to criticize this database relentlessly. I would argue that they have no moral grounds to do so whatsoever; if “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” applies to the NSA/GCHQ/FRA databases, it applies to this one too. Perhaps this is the clearest example yet why that cliché does not apply, does never apply. “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” is dangerous, deceptive, and wrong, and if those people are sincere in their criticism, they are welcome to start criticizing the mass surveillance overall.

This catalog is merely one aspect of the mass surveillance culture.

At the end of the day, though, I can’t help thinking that we’re lucky that this particular kind of databases is still illegal. That may not be the case for much longer, seeing how NSA’s mass surveillance – assisted by the British GCHQ, the Swedish FRA, and others – appears to be legal, at least superficially legal enough for bureaucrats to defend the surveillance as legal and discard complaints.

People who have been defending the mass surveillance with the deceptive “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” are more than welcome to start discovering where that dangerous attitude is leading us. This is not going to be the last example.

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About The Author: Rick Falkvinge

Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.

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How would anyone argue this is anything but a racist waste of tax payer money? Seriously, I want to know whose idea it was to make this database, and how they justified it to get funding for it, and of course, who agreed to give that funding.

No need to waste tax payers money. It is just a simple click on the program.
In Germany you are not that far away from that:http://bestandsdatenauskunft.de/
PIRATES and a mass of over 5.000 supporters did an appeal on an institutional issue. This law provides an interface between personal data and the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) and the customs as well. It is not be a big surprise that xkeyscore and other software are already in use by these offices while they already “showed” Belarus the handling.

First of all, It is a fact that 90% of all gibsys in Sweden do comit crime. Offcause the Police will monitor them. Secontdly Sweden dont have a democracy compared to other democratic countries.
Seriously, Who wants to be a policeman?
If do their job, Some journalist always complains that they are over agresive,
And when then dont do anything people complain.
Take the riots in Gothenburg for example. One guy threw a stone in the head of a policeman so the policeman got unconcious. Other cops shot the guy in the stommac. Offcause the police got the blame from the press.

Unfortunately there is no official statistic on gypsey-criminality because the state wants to cover up their criminality. Anyone with experience in law enforcements can tell you about gypsey-criminality(which is rampant). However Jan Guillous has broken the news in one of the classic pieces of swedish journalism that there was a report made in the 90s by the government that was classified “in order not to forment racism”. I recommend you read this article.

First of all
– we all are criminalised but most of us not yet caught or sued,
“The CFAA imposes civil >>> and criminal liability << unauthorised access to a protected computer.

– we all are copyright infringers but not yet caught and sued
example for an old one: the click on a weblink for any app but texts
“US patent 5,838,906,[13] titled “Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document,”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas#Patents
6.000 software related patents each week. Do you know what you are allowed to type or to tweet not to get sued like “Oatmeal” or “Die Ärzte” vs. PIRATES?

Actually I was an observer during the Gothenburg riots. I saw policemen throwing stones into the crowd, then chocking the crowd and driving them before to clear an area.

Left on the ground was a girl maybe 14 years old bleeding from the head from one of the policemens stones. The ambulance that came did not prioritize the bleeding girl. Or maybe they did not get the chance as they may not have seen her. The ambulance left with a policeman that had been hit on the helmet. I do not know what happened to the girl. I got bored and went for lunch.

The only thing the shot guy did, as I understand it, was throw a stone in the general direction of the police. He was too far away to do otherwise. It is not as if he was a shot put Olympic champion. Someone else had rendered the policeman horizontal, if not unconscious. And even if he had, that is not a capital offence.

Is there a Swedish NGO or citizens’ group that could take the relevant police officers and their political bosses before a criminal court?
Even if the case were to fail to convict anyone, it would be a useful measure of the state of Swedish democracy.

For those ignorant of history, what the holocaust did to the Jews was horrible. But what the holocaust did to the Romani was even worse. They were subjected to medical experiments more horrible than you can imagine and the Romani almost went extinct during WW2.

This is not an isolated event. All over Europe the support for fascism is rising. In Greece and Hungary already have fascist politicians in parliament. And people seem very willing to continue the holocaust. After all, Greece already has many overfull concentration camps.

It is the late Weimar Republic all over again. And Europe seems to be heading full speed towards repeating history.

While I agree with you in general, I think we have to go deeper. People are not hating Romani out of thin air, and neither because they are different, or because they have a browner skin.
Among Romani people, sometimes criminality has become a part of their culture. They teach kids how to steal at the age of 8. They often grow up to be arrogant, aggressive dumbasses who have almost no education, who believe if they need something they can take it from someone weaker, who believe that “work is for the peasants(non Romani)”. They throw parties to celebrate when someone is going to jail, jail time served is considered an achievement. It is really a culture of criminality, a culture that is utterly incompatible with almost any other culture.

By now you are probably saying something along the lines of: “You are generalizing a lot of people. They cannot all be like that, some of them must be OK.” And you are right, there are Romani people who live a life that is compatible with society.
But there are way too many of them that do not.

And this is not a new issue in Eastern Europe, but the “democratic” governments following the collapse of the Eastern Block have all failed to properly address the problem of Romani people. Why? Because it is not in their interests. What IS in their interests is to have a great mass of pisshead dumb, shortsighted and selfish people, because they are easy to manipulate. Just promise that the social aid money will keep coming for the “poor and jobless” (which of course they are) and they will vote for you, happy in the fact that they have secured their money to spend on their gambling habits.

And by not only ignoring the problem, but exacerbating it , the major parties have created perfect conditions for the not-entirely unreasonable rise of fascism. It is a symptom that society is sick. The throat had been sore for some time, but they ignored it, and here is the fever.

You have no idea what IQ actually means.
Contrary to what you’d expect from the term ‘Intelligence Quotient’, IQ actually serves as a measure of education, knowledge, and even cultural and socioeconomical standing, far more than any inherent mental capacity, and so it is perfectly expected that a group of relatively poor and relatively uneducated persons would score lower than the majority population.

you could be talking about any country and any people. but you won’t change your perception enough ever to see outside of your own bullshit. it’s the same for all the world. no one wants to see what they do wrong, just place blame elsewhere.

Hungary does NOT have a fascist prime minister at the moment, thank you very much! Viktor Orban is doing great things for a great nation that has too long struggled since the fall of the communist dictatorship.

What many Europeans seem to forget is that though they have a different culture, language and lifestyle, Roma are people too and this is simply outrageous.

Fortunately Hungary’s prime minister is not fascist, despite him introducing laws that violate human rights. But as I said, Hungary has fascist members of parliament, the fascist party jobbik has 47 seats.

In the US black people have been statistically shown to use illegal drugs pretty much exactly as often as white people, yet are four times as likely to be arrested for their drug use. Do some romani commit crimes, sure, people of all races do. Observer bias is what causes people to believe that a given race is more likely to commit crimes than another.

That said, even if the romani people commit crimes somewhat more often than the general population, that is no reason to keep a database of everyone of romani decent whether they have committed or are suspected of a crime or not, much like how we in the US are fighting against a dragnet surveillance state that keeps records on everyone whether they are suspected of a crime or not.

Surveillance should only occur with probable cause and a judicially approved warrant on a specific person for a specific crime, not based on general suspicion of being suspicious and from a race or culture one finds distasteful.

The more things change, more they stay the same huh?
Looks like the same good old racism of the past, but no with much more powerful and dangerous tools.
The nothing to hide rethoric is so absolutely dangerous. People should be really suspicious if that’s ever the justification for anything.
There’s mass surveillance boom and it seems few politician really seems bothered about it, the public barely knows. And all this information can become so dangerous for people in the future.

It strikes me that for physical theft, we have charges like “possession of stolen property”, which are an even-handed way of dealing with those we don’t catch red-handed.

In Sweden, is there an equivalent to “possession of illegal information”? Any court cases holding evidence of illegal possession to be evidence of criminality?

If we wish to keep people from snooping on us, we need something easier than catching the criminals in the act. The U.S. especially needs this, as people spied upon have been denied legal standing because they couldn’t prove they were the victims of the spies!

Europeans that give raw data to the USA is actual traitors. US citizens that give raw data to Israel is traitors. Many of the Swedish citizens that harm fellow Swedish citizens to please a foreign government is traitors. Many European former police officers that collect information about fellow citizens on behalf of a foreign government is traitors. As the secrecy that prevent investigation is based on contracts based on “law”, a top to down investigation might save our society. It hinges on to whom the traitors give their loyalty. If heads of states believe they are not allowed to do this, something is very wrong. At a minimum they must be removed from the position.

A lot of the information gathering from corporations and government employees is illegal by domestic laws too.

Knowledge (and secrecy) about the databases and the surveillance is interdependent. Acceptance of one by civil servants is acceptance of the other. If there were to be an uproar or investigation they would be interdependent too.

The scope, scale and illegality of these crimes makes them clearly actionable. Many powerful people would spend a long time in jail if they were given a fair trail, and a fair number of clerks too. By already existing laws. Though there seems to be some reluctance by those responsible for these acts to initiate investigations into the matter.

Maybe registration of a single ethnicity makes the risks of surveillance more tangible? The speed mass surveillance has infected western society and the meek response to it means the premises of democracy itself is in danger. If it is not dead already. It might be too late. I hope we hasn’t passed the event horizon.

Yes we do have. Child porn for instance. Posession of depictions or even evidence of crimes being illegal. It’s not required that they prove you have gotten it yourself from your own free will, but it’s enough that it is “in your possession”. Perfect for blackmailers “Do as we say or we’ll make you look like a perv and no one will want to help you with anything anymore”.

In Sweden at least Gottfrid Svartholm Warg got reduction of prison time because they could not prove his computer was not hacked – alas they could not prove he was not set up. We need more of that – requirements of “proof without a doubt” in a world where spying and identity saboutage is becoming more and more common.

A small note for the readers: Romani are NOT Romanian people. We’re two different ethnic congregations. Romani = gypsies. Romanian = old population of Eastern Europe situated between the Carpathians, Danube and The Black Sea. Unfortunately, the renaming (gypsy > romani) was a desired failure (on purpose) since the beginning. Action should be taken to massively school the gypsy children and straigthen their life expectations – a mission from which every country in Europe (and UE) successfully ran away. On the long run, it will become a serious demographic problem.

It cannot be done. One cannot just raise population IQ of 70-75 to 100ish by schooling. Biology puts certain limitations on what can be done. Quite a lot of their children already require special education, because normal schools are too hard for them.

By that measure, it’s suprising that we ever emerged from hunter-gathers. Actually never mind; we are the dumbasses. The hunter-gatherers only had to work 20 hours a week to survive! Guess what? Those of us who “work” 40+ hours a week ARE the real dumbasses.

Biology has a minor role in education. Culture matters. In Canada, we’ve come to regret “Residential Schooling” – because those who were charged with integrating the cultures were corrupt, cruel, and regarded charges as less than human.

One must be careful how the integration of the gypsies is accomplished.

You don’t need any IQ above body’s temperature to use “roboters” or such monitoring programs. It is as simple and dangerous as to click and start the high frequency trading program at the stocks.
Just be aware of: Divide et impera!
Even police just do their job. They suffer the same way at the latest when they undress and get civic again. We are one people!
We need to drop down language barrier. Can anyone develope kind of “babelfish”?

And where did the Europeans come from Mr. Emil? Wasn’t it Asia too?
And what do you mean by schooling Mr. Emil? Do you mean your type of schooling? Romani are a highly creative and indipendent, bilingual people, with a wide spectrum of skills (including an artistic spirit) that are needed to self sufficiently survive in a conventiional society where everyone blindly follows dictated rules. Read some books on their culture Mr. Emil. It will do you good. And by the way, there isn’t such a thing as ‘Romani race’. They are an ethnic group, usually bilingual, very close to open air and nature, and vastly misunderstood.

I think this disgraceful action by Sweden against this truly unique, and generally peaceful group of people, who enrich humanity with their colorful existence, sheds even more light into the exploitative methods by which so called civilized societies (which have no hesitation in selling arms to ruthless dicators) prosper.

In Czech Republic, as an example, the situation is somewhat broken between a huge government-issued social help towards gypsies and a growing negative public opinion (which is only increased by such “mission” as you call it, based on the unfair advantage arguement). Eventually, the situation is the opposite to what you imply – there’s no running away from the problem, but instead of acceptance, this “help” is being regarded as a step further down the exiled gypsy drain. When you start looking for the specific individual problems however, you can’t not notice the largely asocial pattern that gypsies possess and spread among themselves on daily basis. I genuinely can’t see a good guy solution – we would have to rip their children by force and reeducate them (and you surely know where that would be headed). If you have some magical solution that everyone overlooked, I’m sure we’re all ears, but education as we offer it didn’t work so far.

>Unfortunately, the renaming (gypsy > romani) was a desired failure (on purpose) since the beginning.

The use of “Romany” as opposed to “Gypsy” in English is significant in Britain (less so in continental Europe where most gypsies are Roma) because the Tinks and the Romanies are totally different peoples – the cultures are general similar, but they speak different languages and the Romany tend to be richer and better-educated.

Isn’t such a “database” just a query into some central register? If it contains a race field, getting all Romani people would be trivial, exactly as filtering by anything else. I find it hard to imagine this is not the case.

Isn’t such a “database” just a query into some central register? If it contains a race field (and that would be the critical part of it), getting all Romani people would be trivial, exactly as filtering by anything else in the db. I find it hard to imagine this is not the case or hasn’t been at some point in history.

Only in Sweden. HUUUGE surveillance scandal goes right by, little surveillance scandal that happens to be targeted at people that actually are more likely to commit crimes (I’m not saying it’s right, though) is flooding the news and other programs, just because it’s targeting the Romani.

The NSA/GCHQ/FRA are doing this and incredibly much more towards EVERYONE, Romani or not. Can someone spell ‘hypocrisy’?

They aren’t more likely to commit crimes. Any more than black people are more likely to commit crimes in the USA just because a whole lot of people on the African continent and inner cities are criminals.

Stop treating people like criminals because of their race and maybe they’ll resent your ass less.

Ask ANY shopkeeper who has regular visits from Romani, who steals most often.

I’m not saying that one specific Romani person is more or less likely to commit crimes, that is up to his or her personality and moral, but statistically, if you have, say a thousand Romani and a thousand random other Swedes, I would be very surprised if the difference wasn’t clearly visible.

That does in no way warrant treating Romani in general as criminals, registering them and so on, which I was very clear about in my last comment too. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

We have to realize that the mere presence of information technologies enlist us in an information war. We cannot evaluate the risk of handing over our information on the basis of normal expectations. We cannot even judge it against the acts of history. Think of a flock of birds, gathered up in the shape of an arrow. Is the arrow shape contained within the bird taken alone? No. It is an emergent property that can be observed only when the birds accumulate and then flock. Likewise, the “I have nothing to hide” crowd ignore what can emerge from databases.

For unpopular minorities information technology is a hell, the highest wall, to block off all escape routes. Nomads without a territory are being territorialized, settled, at least within the database. No matter where they go, they will occupy their proper place in the database. Their history, their present, and maybe even their future will be written there.

This is not unlawful. It is horrifying. But the pseudo-citizens of Facebook-Nation will never grasp that there is no longer a meaningful distinction between military and civilian, that espionage is just every interaction that flows across the network.

Your news comes after I’ve read that 500 Rromane people have continued their never ending journey passing through Romania and settling in Goteborg. I don’t think that the Police Corporation is always just, but I understand why some people have concerns when large populations of people migrate. You can translate the article with Google Translate:

People seem to be unaware that there is a significant amount of so-called crime tourism happening in Scandinavia and other European nations. Roma people in Romania live in poor conditions and under discrimination of the main Romanian population. Organised gangs send people to different countries to:
-Beg (old ladies sit on street corners and youngish men come and collect the money at the end of the day). This may seem weird to Americans, but begging is not normal in Scandinavian countries.
-Prostitute. This involves human trafficking. Shamefully, the business is good in European countries. Some men like fucking abused women.
-Litter. They live in camps and leave huge amounts of trash in their camping areas.
-Commit crime (stealing copper wiring, stuff from work sites, burglaries, pickpocketing etc.). For example, Romanian gangs are behind 90% of hole-in-the-wall scams in the UK.
These people have no education, no money, and no language skills – and they’re under the control of criminal gangs.
All this is documented by unbiased and unracist sources such as the BBC. These criminal networks rake in millions of euros and cause a lot suffering to the roma people and increase racist attitudes toward them.
In this context it is completely naive to say that “roma people are just people” as some have said in this thread. The roma people in most European nations are part of criminal activity, most against their own will or due to the lack of any other options.

And even worse, that is still a narrow subset of holocaust.
Idiots, cripples, communists and gays were rounded up earlier. Especially gays and idiots were tortured extensively.

Worse, the few that survived were treated badly by “civilized” winner nations. There is an effort to prevent polluting of the gene pool and mind now, so expect this idea to have a second Renaissance.

And worst of all, the Romani were subject to mass sterilizations and medical experiments after the war. Even in Scandinavia. In England they were fond of researching the effects of radiation on infants and pregnant women, in statistical significant numbers. Though England had ethnic agnostic research too; they picked up “special ones” (poor children from the street) that were used for more general medical research, so not everything was racism.

All people is always responsible for their own actions, whatever they have experienced. But the prolonged mistreatment and injustice, may, have contributed to the opportunistic gratitude deficiency towards holier-than-thou us.

Please do your best to not allow the governments and institutions to cross the line that separates freedom from fascism like has happened in the US. When your representatives start incessantly talking about freedom it’s probably already too late. I’m speaking from the point of view of someone that lived in another wealthy, democratic country before moving the US.

I really have to laugh at all you people being so outraged at this.
On the one hand you all think that all information should be freely available and that books, music recordings, films, tv shows, scientific discoveries, inventions, designs, etc, should all be freely available and copyable by everyone (in contravention of existing laws of copyright, trademark, patent, etc.
But here you are castigating the police because they are collecting information. You can’t have it both ways, either information is free for everyone or it is not. I am sure that the police also have similar databases of information on groups of people who are not Romany as well. If they do not, you know that other organizations do, advertisers for example. You can easily find out all sorts of information easily on the internet (for free or for , shudder, a fee) about anyone – where they live, how old they are, what property they own, how much taxes they pay, what their phone number is, who they are married to, or divorced from, the names of their children, what kind of car they drive, where their bank accounts are, etc etc.

i’ll make an assumption that either the police officers involved here were ordered to do this cataloging, knowing it was illegal, but threatened with some sort of disciplinary action if they didn’t carry out the orders or were willing partners in the crime and under some sort of promise that ‘you will be protected if caught’ or were willing partners because they totally dislike the Romani people. although these officers need to be weeded out, drummed from the police force and then prosecuted for racial discrimination and carrying out illegal practices at the least, the ones who gave the original orders, made the original decisions to do this, need finding and severely punished. there is almost nothing that is anti something or someone that starts with a lowly ranked person and grows. it is much more likely to start with someone who is in a very high ranking, powerful position and have it spread downwards to more ordinary people.
like stated in the report, this is what happened prior to and eventually triggered the start of WWII. how can people totally ignore this? how can they even think about starting all this off yet again? where did it start? in the USA, where so many German prisoners were taken? with the attitude that appears to be so great in the USA and that it is spreading to other countries, namely the UK and Sweden, obviously, is the intention to start this ‘ethnic cleansing’ again, this time, perhaps with the Muslim communities? there certainly seems to be a lot of countries that are ruled by a particular political party, having particular views, all wrapped around doing as much damage as possible to the ordinary people, while keeping the already rich and powerful in their positions and enhancing them if they can. a lot of countries, as well, are doing whatever they can to restrict what the working class can have, can go, can do, mainly through restricting wages, restricting movement and increasing surveillance on them. these are very troubling signs indeed. if we are not careful, the few in these powerful positions are going to implement actions that remove more of the already struggling ordinary people by instigating measures that will mean the end of a lot of lives, while sitting somewhere watching it all unfold, happy in the belief that nothing and no one can get to them!!

About The Author

Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.